There’s a new type of malware called VPNFilter, which has “has infected
at least half a million home and small business routers including those sold
by Netgear, TP-Link, Linksys, MicroTik, and QNAP network storage devices”.
This code is intended to “serve as a multipurpose spy tool, and also creates
a network of hijacked routers that serve as unwitting VPNs, potentially
hiding the attackers’ origin as they carry out other malicious activities”.
See the story on Wired
for all the details.

Canonical released an update to address 13 security vulnerabilities,
including the new Spectre Variant 4, for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 17.10, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Canonical notes that “to fully mitigate Spectre Variant 4,
users must also update the processor microcode firmware”. See the security
announcement for more info, and update now.

I installed Linux Mint a few weeks ago because Windows was acting sluggish and I wanted to know if it was a problem with my hardware or Windows. I found that Linux was much faster, and reinstalling Windows fixed the sluggish problem.

Since then, I’ve not used Linux at all. Is there anything I can do with it? I don’t intend to fully switch to Linux, and I could use the extra HDD space for my new Windows installation.

Pathing is still very confusing to me when using make install. I’m not exactly sure where things are installed to and having to remove what to make absolutely sure it’s back to its state before installing manually compiled software.

sudo apt-get install/remove makes life so much easier, but sometimes I have to compile manually to include certain options, or lack of sudo priv

Another big thing is, sometimes I mess up and install multiple copies, how do I specify which should be used when calling it by name? basically how do I change the “which [curl]”